In a Nutshell

Posted on December 8, 2013 by Roger Gosden
chestnuts

Chestnuts from Italy

“This chestnut orchard (or forest as one may call it) spread along the mountainside as far as the eye could see. The expanse of broad-topped, fruitful trees was interspersed with a string of villages of stone houses. The villages were connected by a good road that wound horizontally in and out along the projections and coves of the mountainside. These grafted chestnut orchards produced an annual crop of food for men, horses, cows, pigs, sheep, and goats, and a by-crop of wood. Thus for centuries trees had supported the families that lived in the Corsican villages. The mountainside was uneroded, intact, and capable of continuing indefinitely its support for the generations of men.” J. Russell Smith. Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, 1929

When Russell Smith rode through Corsica in the 1920s he saw chestnut trees growing on stony mountain slopes where most other crops could never grow. The land didn’t need irrigating or fertilizing or plowing, and hardly required attention from the villagers before harvesting the tasty, nutritious nuts in September. Chestnuts were called “the food of laziness.” They were a staple in the local diet, versatile ingredients of many recipes, and could be milled to make flour, although chestnut bread cannot rise without gluten. The trees provided a surplus for hogs to eat, imparting a delicious “woody” flavor to the meat, and the logs made sturdy furniture and house sidings and fence posts that wouldn’t rot.

His visit nearly a century ago left a deep impression on him. A single species of nut tree had helped to sustain the Corsicans in their mountain fastness since the Roman Empire, whereas in another rugged terrain in Appalachia he knew farmers struggling on land that soon became impoverished. They had cleared the old forest to grow corn and other annual crops, but after the harvest there was little ground cover for holding back the topsoil from washing downhill into the creeks towards the ocean. Russell Smith thought they were bound to fail because “farming should fit the land”.

Dustbowl

Farmhouse north of Dalhart, TX 1938. Dorothea Lange. Library of Congress.

He published Tree Crops the year of the Wall Street crash. It was the last of a series of wet years in the Midwest before a drought visited the Great Plains of America for years, and the Great Depression spread across the country. The prairies had been a stable biome for eons because the topsoil was anchored by prairie grasses and fertilized by bison and other grazers. But like the mountain men, prairie farmers were cultivating land as their ancestors had in Europe where agricultural practices had evolved over centuries in a gentler climate. After plowing deeply for planting and leaving the ground bare in winter after gathering the cereal and cotton crops the dry topsoil blew away in great swirling clouds, some of the dust settling as far away as New York. The Dustbowl gave new meaning to a pejorative label, “dirt poor farmers,” and the calamity forced Oakies like the Joads and many others in neighboring states to abandon Grapes of Wrath country. After departing west along Route 66 with all their possessions and hopes loaded in a caravan of old trucks, the farm gates were still swinging in the wind when modern agribusiness took over.

Grapes_of_Wrath

1939 edition

Perhaps erosion of rich soil and the accompanying human suffering were avoidable. Russell Smith believed it was folly to grow annual crops incessantly on land that was exposed to the elements.  The Corsicans had hit on an answer that he called “permanent agriculture” (or “permaculture”). It was unrealistic and unnecessary to abandon annual crops, but there was an enormous unrealized potential for expanding productive orchards and planting rows of trees to protect fields; besides, some nut trees thrive on ground that is too rocky or steep or prone to flooding for cultivating annuals. Nut trees can be harvested every year without replanting, and don’t need concentrated fertilizers or soil tilling or watering from aquifers. Trees can stabilize soil structure and improve its nitrogen content, as well as provide perennial wildlife shelters and absorb huge volumes of carbon dioxide. Admittedly, some trees produce a superabundant harvest in mast years followed by a series of lean years, which is commercially undesirable. But this problem was not insuperable, and two of his friends at the forefront of horticulture technology, Robert Morris and William Deming, were already creating cultivars for cropping more consistently.

Today there is a large range of cultivars of nut and fruit trees—almonds, walnuts, pecans, pistachios, apples, pears, cherries, nectarines, etc., but if Russell Smith came back he would be sad to see we are even more dependent now on annual crops—mainly corn, wheat and soybeans—and only a few high-yielding varieties of each. He would fear that a small number of annual crops is a precarious food supply. Many agronomists in his day thought that food production would not keep up with the world’s population, which the English actuary Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) predicted would lead to catastrophe. They did not live to see the Green Revolution led by Norman Borlaug in the 1960s which, through efficient irrigation and application of pesticides and fertilizers, as well as new varieties of cereal and other crops, could keep the world fed ahead of its numbers.

Cereals are now a smaller fraction of the American household budget than at any time in  history, and form a larger portion of the diet. According to the World Food Programme, hunger kills more people in the world than the three major infectious diseases combined, but the statistics are improving. And although US farmers always have worries, government subsidies have supported their commodity prices and crop insurance to the tune of nearly $300 bn from 1995-2010 (family farms receive little benefit). Our society seems to have little reason to consider large-scale changes to agronomy while people are well-fed and we are sheltered from the draught of the real price of growing food and the environmental costs of modern agriculture, which will be paid by future generations. Tree crops have little of the economic or political gravitas of cereals, and advocates can be regarded as nuts, except in the state that has them in order—California.

Seen from the air, almond orchards in the Central Valley stretch from horizon to horizon in rows of trees so straight they look like lines of longitude. California produces 80% of the world’s crop of shelled almonds, amounting to 2 billion pounds this year with a gross value of $2.8 bn. As the state’s top agricultural export, almonds are a huge success story, but the industry follows the same philosophy that created great oceans of cereals in the Midwest—monocultures on land purged of other life forms. This is not how permanent agriculture was envisioned by pioneer thinkers, nor its modern advocates like Philip Rutter in Minnesota and Peter Kahn at Rutgers University. Besides, the industry is facing challenges.

Unlike wind-pollinated grain crops, almond trees need insects for their flowers to set seed. Early in the year commercial beekeepers from all over the country transport a million beehives to the Valley for the largest controlled pollination program in the world. But their services have been seriously undermined by colony collapse disorder. Plant scientists have responded by making hybrid almond trees that are self-pollinating, hoping to maintain the size and quality of the harvest. In parts of China where bees are in even shorter supply, orchard workers pollinate trees by hand using brushes and swabs, which would be uneconomic here. Maybe drones will be recruited in future. I don’t mean the lazy male bees whose raison d’être is sex with the queen, but something like the hummingbird drones said to be in production for the Pentagon! Much as I admire feats of engineering, I wonder if ascent up a technological spiral in which fixes are regularly needed to repair fixes below is the only answer. Some farmers have always set aside portions of land to grow perennials to protect ground crops, which provides food for bees the year round so they don’t have to be moved after a single flowering crop, and are less likely to be exposed to diseases, parasites, and pesticides from traveling around the country.

There were still plenty of honey bees when Russell Smith and his friends proposed permanent agriculture, but they were not blind to problems that tree crops face. Four billion wonderfully productive American chestnut trees died off in the early decades of the century from an Asian blight and ink disease was felling chestnuts across Europe, and eventually Corsica. Since then, so many other trees have succumbed to disease. The trio were not dreamers and their scientific outlook turned their heads to plant breeding technology for creating resistant varieties, which was in its infancy then. The technology progresses slowly because hybrid trees cannot be tested for resistance to a disease for several years, which transgenic technology promises to accelerate.

Not all nuts are nuts in a strict botanical sense. Almonds are drupes and peanuts are legumes, but they have honorary nut status here as edible seeds. As reproductive parts of plants, they are uncommonly nutritious, and somewhat equivalent in food value to eggs in animals.

One day chestnuts will be abundant again, though not in my lifetime. At this time of year we used to buy expensive bags of chestnuts from street vendors who you can still see inthe streets of London and New York. Sometimes we took them home to cook on our own coals, like the Nat King Cole song. But they were only for the festive season, and when we ate them we never enjoyed a warm thought of being nourished. Nowadays, however, nuts are regarded as an almost perfect food and are key ingredients in the renowned Mediterranean diet.

Nuts are rich in proteins containing essential amino acids, and good sources of antioxidants, fiber, and micronutrients. They contain beneficial minerals (iron, magnesium, zinc, etc.) and vitamins: vitamin A (butternuts, chestnuts, pistachios, hickory nuts), vitamin C (chestnuts), vitamin E (almonds), vitamin K (cashew nuts, pine nuts) and folate (ginkgo nuts, peanuts).  None of them contain gluten, which is welcome news for people with celiac disease and the much larger number whose sensitivity  causes a broad spectrum of symptoms. Chestnuts contain the most carbohydrates, but have a low glycemic index. Acorns are rich in carbohydrates too, and if the bitter tannins are first extracted from acorns of some species of oak trees they are edible (I’m told).Not all nuts are nuts in a strict botanical sense. Almonds are drupes and peanuts are legumes, but they have honorary status here as edible seeds. As reproductive parts of plants, they are uncommonly nutritious, and somewhat equivalent in food value to eggs in animals.

Nut nutrition

Nuts & Nutrition

Most nuts have a lot of fats, which used to sound bad but now chimes with a vogue for low-carb diets. Consequently, they have more energy for the same weight than grain cereals, and are a more sustaining. Nuts don’t contain cholesterol (nor trans fats, of course), but being loaded with mono- and polyunsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs,PUFAs) they are healthy for the heart and circulation, and beneficial for the brain (a very fatty organ). Large scale studies in America and Britain have shown that people who eat nuts regularly live longer and healthier lives. That doesn’t necessarily mean they were directly responsible for better health because dietary studies rarely have the scientific rigor of drug trials, though plausibly a food that has probably been consumed almost forever is more beneficial than grains that we have only eaten in quantity for a few thousand years. There is always a caveat in biology. Nut allergies affect 1% of us, but, generally speaking, there are so many good reasons for going against the grain and nibbling more nuts. They are so much more tasty than Wonder Bread, but unfortunately more expensive.

When Russell Smith visited Corsica chestnuts were cheap, and chestnut flour was regarded as poor man’s food. Finding wheat flour in a kitchen was then a sign of prosperity.  Likewise, before the blight, American chestnut trees littered the autumnal forest floor with a green carpet of pregnant burrs. You could gather for free as many nuts as you could carry, but most were left to rot. Today at a well-known online retailer, chestnuts, almonds, and walnuts are being sold at around $10 a pound. Hazelnuts and macadamia nuts cost more, and only peanuts are relatively cheap at a third of true nuts. But the equivalent weight of wheat flour or corn meal is barely $1.00. We rarely value things while they are common, and commodities that were cheap can become luxuries when they become rare. Perhaps now that we realize nuts are valuable in so many ways we will take a closer look at permanent agriculture.

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Another Remembrance Day

Posted on November 23, 2013 by Roger Gosden

Boy-scoutVeterans Day came round again last week. It brought to mind a boy standing in the drizzle beside a war memorial near London on what is called Remembrance Day over there. I have a black and white picture in my head of the 1st Farnborough boy scout troop on parade.

We marched on November 11 (or the closest Sunday) from the George & Dragon pub car park to the cemetery at Saint Giles Church where we assembled in serried ranks beside girl scouts and opposite rows of veterans from two World Wars. The men stood stiffly to attention, some needing help with a cane. Almost all wore a dark gabardine mackintosh with a poppy in their buttonhole and bright medals dangling from ribbons. We were in scout uniform, which in those days meant short pants and a green beret pulled over an ear so the rain drained on our shoulder.  Cold, wet, and unnaturally subdued for boys, we had to show a stiff upper lip because our fathers were there.

St. Giles' Church

St. Giles’ Church and war memorial, Farnborough

We waited for a roll call of the fifty names engraved in the granite memorial, followed by the Ode to Remembrance.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

The assembly repeated the last line before a two-minute silence. Then a bugler on the memorial steps called the Last Post (Taps in America).  We then filed into the church through the narthex to the back pews where we fidgeted on the hard wooden boards for the next hour. The rector stepped up to the pulpit in a black cassock and white surplice, probably still wondering in his bowed head how to preach about the unspeakable.

Our parents and grandparents in front of us were remembering comrades, friends, and neighbors whose faces and voices still rang in the halls of their memory. Our family had lost some members, but that was long ago. How could a boy share the same emotions as his elders? How could he remember someone he had never known? The best he could do was to stay awake during the sermon, try to imagine the horrors of war, and resist his attention from drifting to the girl scouts nearby.

I guess it is easier today for American youngsters to have a fuller heart than we had for our veterans of the World Wars because they are likely to know someone who has served in war zones. A personal connection puts flesh on the statistics of conflict, as I appreciated when I saw a brawny young man in a wheelchair with his legs sawn off above the knee. I was tempted to ask, “Was it an I.E.D.?” I should have simply said, “Thank you,” but for me he put a human face on the sacrifice of war which helps me remember when stars and stripes are fluttering again in churchyards and beside mailboxes at this time of year.

While I was musing that personal connections help to make remembrance more heart-felt I wondered about all the other people I have never even paused to think about and all the things that I take for granted in daily life. It doesn’t seem such a big sacrifice to unclutter the mind for just two minutes of meditation once a year for them, although there is the excuse of an endless thank you list that would tax the brain. But I am getting started, and although my choice seems odd I hope the reasons are clear by the end of this post. I am thinking of TREES!

Loblollies

Loblolly pines

No memorial day is set aside for them, although there is a National Arbor Day when planting and caring for trees is encouraged. If there is ever a day for remembering the bountiful forests and our continuing dependence on them Joyce Kilmer’s Trees will probably be its anthem:

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree…

Some trees are so magnificent that they can even stir the heart of a lumberjack who makes his living by clear-cutting forests to the horizontal, like machine-gunners who admired the enemy’s courage even as they slaughtered at the Somme, Passchendaele, and Marne. We say we love trees, yet our actions speak otherwise. A storm of yellow and red leaves out of a maple tree in the fall is mesmerizing, but then we complain about clearing them from our yard. Trees do not just embellish the landscape but are emblematic of all that is grand and worth preserving in nature.

Forests were where most people lived before they were cleared for lumber and to make way for farms, concrete and asphalt. Saint Giles himself was a 7th Century forest-dweller. For untold centuries they provided nutritious food and wood for heating, cooking, tool-making, and furniture, and they harbored an astonishing biodiversity. They still do. Our ancestors felt much more connected with trees than modern man as they dreamt of (and sometimes worshipped) tree spirits—dryads in Greece, kodema in Japan, Ah’ret in Cambodia, and green men in England. The spirits were defenders of the forests and could sway human destiny. It was vital to preserve the sylvan environment for posterity. But when people moved to towns and cities the caretaking spirit was forgotten and timber just a way of making a living and another table.

“The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief…” (John Muir).

Perhaps we are coming round at last to thinking about the great forests in a fresh way, if only because we are alarmed at the prospect of a world without them. We know that they are the lungs of the atmosphere and buffer the rising levels of carbon dioxide, but this realization came late and action to care for forests around the world, and particularly in the tropics, is still ponderous, patchy and often short-sighted. Like the parable of the blind man in Bethsaida who only saw people “looking like trees walking” until he was fully healed, when we look at trees we only see dollar bills and people with wants and needs.

Giant_sequoia

Sequoia grove in California
“Any fool can destroy trees…” John Muir

To meditate on trees it helps to take a trip to see the giants. It is as impossible to avoid looking up in awe at a grove of sequoia in California as to turn aside from looking down in amazement from the rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. You never forget. On the other side of the country children have fun holding hands in a ring to measure the circumference of the biggest yellow poplar. The stories they take home are lasting.

yellow poplar

Measuring a giant yellow poplar.
Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, NC State Universities Libraries

This last tract of virgin hardwoods containing giant poplar trees in the mountains of North Carolina has been protected by the US Department of Forestry since 1936 when it was named after the poet, the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest.  Outside the preserve every large tree was taken down because they all had a price on their boles. The titanic American chestnut trees that once dominated the forest canopy even over the poplars had a different fate since they fell everywhere to a malignant blight, and few people are alive today who can remember them. But to stand among the surviving giants can feel like being among veterans sharing a solemn remembrance of the fallen, including Joyce Kilmer himself who lay down among the trees that died the same day on the Marne battlefield not long after writing his poem.

Paul Nash

We are Making a New World. Paul Nash 1918.

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Green Fire

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Roger Gosden

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view” (Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949).gray wolf

As a forester in the South-West, Leopold’s job was to control predators for protecting game species.  But one day after shooting a wolf he had something like a religious conversion experience: an ineffable change of heart. He started questioning policies and cherished beliefs about managing wildlife populations. He guessed that when wolves and cougars were extirpated the deer and elk populations would boom, the genetic stock would deteriorate as less fit animals were no longer weeded out, and overgrazing herds could eat out their food supply and starve. He had realized that when a keystone species is eliminated the ecosystem gets out of whack, although he didn’t live to see proof of his theory when gray wolves were reintroduced to the Yellowstone National Park.

Leopold, exchanging his rifle for a pen, drafted a Land Ethic from his Wisconsin farm at the end of life. When I read the passage that, “conservation is a state of harmony between men and land,” I wondered about my own backyard.  Is it as harmonious as I assumed, or had I been hardening an ecologically dissonant landscape?

After a hurricane ravaged our acreage we brought in topsoil, planted trees, seeded lawns, and laid out flowerbeds. It was patient work and now, nearly a decade later, the yard looks mature and the new growth provides welcome shade from Virginia’s summer sun. A landscape designer planned the attractive setting for our home, something that neighbors and visitors could admire and I could imagine featuring in a glossy garden magazine. But in making landscape appeal the goal we paid no heed to the interests of critters who shared the land with us. Perhaps I was delusional in thinking I was acting as nature’s physician, healing the wounded land by turning it into a garden of neat lawns and cheerful flowers. I know how appearances can be deceptive, like assuming that a ruddy human face always means a healthy body.

Energy pyramid

Energy pyramid

Healthy bodies don’t need a physician because they can fight off some threats and repair wounds.  We have allostatic mechanisms that return stressed bodies to a stable state. Likewise in the oak-hickory forests that existed here before European colonization, there was a self-regulating biome in which the bottom of an energy pyramid fed by products of decomposition and photosynthesis provided nourishment for a rich variety of herbivorous animals which, in turn, fed carnivores and top predators. After a wildfire or storm the landscape was gradually restored by a succession of larger plants and trees, like scabs healing over a skin wound until the canopy closed over again. When Teddy Roosevelt wrote about the Grand Canyon, “You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it,” he might have been thinking about the great eastern forest of America, but it was already fragmented. It had taken only a few generations to undo what eons of evolution had created.

A land as bountiful as Virginia’s was never going to be left to nature. The Peninsula is now a mosaic of farms, gardens, and woodlots. It is picturesque, even romantic (Virginia is for Lovers), but no longer in harmony with nature. Even nature preserves that look “natural” to our eyes need help in their struggle against invasive animals, plants, and diseases introduced from Asia and Europe: bamboo marches, kudzu smothers, cankers kill, and Japanese stiltgrass blankets the forest floor. Gardeners and farmers wage incessant war on alien plants and epidemics of tent caterpillars, Japanese beetles, ticks, and cloven-hooved locusts (deer).

kudzu

kudzu vines

Despite spraying lakes of herbicides and pesticides, the insurgents keep coming back. In trying to dominate nature and grow for our own needs and pleasure we are eliminating, often unintentionally, some critters at the top of the pyramid that are most beneficial as pest consumers (birds, bats, amphibians, and reptiles) or control deer herds (wolves). At the bottom of the pyramid our impact is mostly feeble or temporary (invasive and disease-bearing plants, fungi, and microbes). We would like to turn the pyramid on its head, but that is biologically impossible. Being mainly an urban species now, most of us are unaware of how much havoc human ecology has created and our continuing dependence on nature.  Some species of formerly common birds have declined by over two-thirds since the 1960s; many butterflies and bumble bees that do magisterial pollination services are vanishing; forty years ago you had to raise your voice to be heard here above the din of crooning frogs, but no longer. Poisons and starvation are depleting the landscape of wonderful creatures and some of our best friends.

Japanese stiltgrass

Japanese stiltgrass is even eschewed by deer

Before I read Leopold’s book I was already tapering off my use of chemicals in the yard, applying Roundup only for spot treatment of weeds. But now I realize that my change of heart was far too tepid, and that pretty flower borders and lawns look like sterile deserts to the critters who used to live here. Most of the plants we buy are aliens that evolved in quite different environments, and without their natural herbivores they grow profusely, sometimes out-competing the natives.

If these foreigners are unpalatable to caterpillars and grubs it would explain why butterflies, bugs, and creepy-crawlies are so much diminished, except for the hardiest ones which can boom when they have fewer competitors and predators. To test this hunch I checked if insects prefer our native plants.

I collected bundles of leaves from many different species in our yard to count the percentage that had been nibbled. This wasn’t a perfect study, but I didn’t need more data to convince me that natives (green color) were the preferred food plants by a huge margin. Most aliens (red) were ignored by the diners.

leaf survey

Leaves nibbled by insects

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Apart from a few insects that are not fussy about their veggies, most are particular about their food plant which they are adapted to chew and digest because they evolved in the same habitat. We have provided an inedible landscape.

phragmites

phragmites

Animals can adapt to graze a species that is new to them, but require thousands of generations. Take for instance phragmites (“phrag”), an aggressive reed that is overrunning wetlands and shorelines up and down the East Coast. In its homeland on the other side of the globe it is a food plant for 170 species of herbivores of all kinds, but since it was introduced to North America three centuries ago there are still only five species that will eat it. The mill of evolution grinds slowly.

Doug Tallamy’s book helped to bring home these thoughts (Bringing Nature Home). He is an ecologist at the University of Delaware whose vision is a garden revolution for a more sustainable relationship with nature. It is too late to preserve more wilderness areas here, but there are lots of “spare” land in backyards, and 40 million acres of lawn in the US. He urges us to cast aside esthetic preferences to cultivate more native plants.

This doesn’t mean turning back the clock to the original forest—which has gone forever. But we can have a healthier land, and need it as desperately as a patient fed by tubes, wires, and drips in the ICU needs organ and stem cell transplants to recover.

But when Tallamy explained that native plants help to restore the numbers of insects I paused.

Yikes! Is he crazy? What will my family and neighbors say?

“Don’t we have enough bugs already, Roger?” I hear someone say. “Remember the yellow jackets that chased me inside? And didn’t you complain about horseflies?”

“Yes, dear.”

It’s hard to defend bugs and creepy-crawlies, apart from butterflies and bees. It’s easy to point fingers at industries that pollute waterways and developers that scorch the ground for new shopping malls. But responsibility also rests on our shoulders, and especially gardeners and farmers as land stewards.

With a pricked conscience I raised my lawnmower blades to their maximum height so that white clover flowers beloved by pollinators are not decapitated. I’m now convinced that clover is more attractive than fescue, staying green all winter, and more beneficial, providing soil nourishment by nitrogen-fixation in the roots. Clover is not a native here, but I’ve found commercial growers that supply native plants for a butterfly garden: milkweed for monarchs, spicebush for swallowtails, and violets for fritillaries. I also have a new “immigration control” policy for alien plants, and am growing native redbud, dogwood, crab apple, Rudbeckia, sneezeweed, joe pye weed, wild asters, and possumhaw. They are no less beautiful, and if their leaves are grazed more by insects I feel a green fire of satisfaction that critters will feast on them.

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The Return of the Native

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Roger Gosden

Blogger_at-workApologies to anyone who recently visited my blogs posted between January and March 2013 and found the pictures were missing. This was a widespread problem affecting WordPress bloggers, but the images have now been reloaded.

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A large black-and-white bird flying above our yard towards the James River caught my eye last week. It was no “buzzard.” A bald eagle is still uncommon enough to be arresting, and perhaps there is even a patriotic American somewhere who stands to attention when he sees his national emblem soaring past, like Air Force One. But there is a grander reason for saluting the bird—it is a native that has returned home.

Eagles were a common sight in the Chesapeake Bay watershed until catastrophes in the 1950s and ‘60s. In those decades, an industrial plant was disgorging poisons into the James River. The chemical waste was Kepone, an insecticide related to DDT, which so polluted the river that a Virginia Governor prohibited consumption of fish for a 100 mile stretch. But no respecters of law, eagles kept fishing. Not only did they accumulate poison from eating fish but also lead from the scattered gunshot of duck hunters. Hardly a single chick could be brooded in those days. Those woes were aggravated by the loss of nest sites to waterfront developments, and the failure of naïve birds to navigate around traffic and power lines. It seemed as if the 1940 Act of Congress intended to protect the species had been written on disappearing ink.

bald-eagle

Photo: Don Snyder

Forty years ago you would have been lucky to have seen a single eagle along the James; fewer than thirty pairs nested across the entire state. But after the poisons were banned by the EPA in 1972 river health slowly improved, which encouraged the US Fish and Wildlife Service to launch a program for reintroducing eagles. It is perhaps the greatest American conservation story for a single species. Nest sites are monitored annually by fly-overs in light aircraft, and at the last count there were over 700 breeding pairs in the state, allowing the species to be delisted from the Endangered Species Act. So the bird depicted on the escutcheon of the Great Seal of the United States can now be seen even within Washington DC itself, and that is something that even congressmen who put business before conservation should be proud of! 

On that eagle day, my mind was pulled away from its absorbing interest to thoughts that had no obvious connection.  I found myself thinking about Clym Yeobright in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. When an image comes out of the blue like that I often strain to find a meaning for the unexpected distraction. I suppose there was something inside me trying to fathom a metaphor for what I had just seen.

Thomas_Hardy_novel

Clym Yeobright and his wife Eustacia in The Return of the Native

In the novel, Clym returned to his birthplace on Egdon Heath after making his fortune in Paris. It had been hard growing up on the Heath, but he believed it would be easier now to flourish in the bosom of land that had nurtured his ancestors, where old neighbors would celebrate his return and he could settle down to productive work with a wife and family.

Perhaps the novel came to mind because I was uneasy remembering how things turned out for the returning native and deep down was wondering about the fortunes of eagles back in their homeland. But unlike Clym, who needed no help moving to the Heath, bringing species back often needs our helping hands, the very hands that originally extirpated them. The job of preserving species seems unfathomably difficult to me, and is yet so immensely important for preserving the web of life and a healthy planet, which some call Gaia. But since human populations are continuing to migrate from rural origins to urban communities it is easy to forget our dependence on biodiversity. Connections between sources of our food, clothing, medicines, and raw materials for manufacturing and building on the one hand and living things “out there” on the other are under-rated or taken for granted. Without beloved companion animals inner city dwellers might even forget that we share the planet with other creatures. And when we do think of human ecology we find it overwhelming and hope that someone else is working on it.

The United Nations has designated our times as a Decade of Biodiversity. It is an admirable attempt to draw global attention to environmental sickness, even if the politicians themselves are soon distracted by the latest humanitarian disaster (caring for the one species instead of for all). Unfortunately, no one I asked had ever heard about this splendid declaration—nor had I before preparing this post—but the responsibility for preserving biodiversity really should fall on our shoulders, and the efforts of government, NGOs, researchers, and citizen scientists need our support.

Since zoos, wildlife parks, and technology can only go so far towards preserving species, rare animals and plants must eventually be reintroduced to their old habitats. The international organization that reports population status and coordinates reintroduction programs is the IUCN. It publishes the famous Red List of species that are threatened or endangered, including those that are extinct. A Threatened species is one that is vulnerable to stepping down the list to Endangered, the dire category which used to include bald eagles. Searching the List for threatened species is quite sobering because it includes 41% of all amphibians, 34% of conifers, 33% of corals, 31% of sharks and rays, 25% of mammals, and 13% of birds around the world. Diners are relieved that most types of lobster are safe, at least for now (1%).

When humans become urbanized the disconnection with nature makes it harder to notice or even care about year-on-year changes in the natural environment or that a formerly abundant species has now grown scarce. Like the drip-drip of a retreating glacier, it is only by observing over a period of time that you notice how far it has retreated up the mountain. At least that is how I rationalize the gap between my impression that songbirds are as common as ever in my backyard and the fact that national bird counts reveal alarming trends over my lifetime.

It is a sad reflection on the character of Homo economus that both the UN and conservationists feel it is necessary to appeal to our self-interest to encourage conservation-mindedness. One of their favorite examples is the Amazon jungle, for which preservation is sought for the cornucopia of potentially valuable products and medical remedies for ourselves. Perhaps we would feel more concerned if we lived five times longer than our four score years, since we would then have to face a more impoverished landscape in our own lifetime. But for me the moral argument is so much more powerful: that if we live more gently with nature we can avoid the curse of posterity for grandstanding and being grand executioners during the sixth great extinction on earth. This is the only extinction we cannot blame on geology or asteroids.

If the resources available for research and conservation were stretched thinly enough to cover most threatened species nothing could be achieved, so hard choices have been made. Those getting most attention are well-loved or iconic species, and many of them sit at the top of the food chain, like eagles. Golden lion tamarins (Brazil), Siberian tigers (Asia), black-footed ferrets (Great Plains), and gray wolves (Yellowstone National Park) have been successfully reintroduced, and the publicity helps to prime the pump for funding other projects. But what about more lowly species that are nevertheless important for supporting those above them in the chain? Who is going to help half-a-million species of beetles?  The physiologist J.B.S. Haldane pointed out that God must have had “an inordinate fondness” for them, so surely they deserve some attention?

I have a particular fondness for the red kite story because forty years ago I drove with student friends to Tregaron Bog in mid-Wales to see the last survivors in Britain. Before persecution they thrived throughout the country where they provided equivalent services to vultures in other countries. We only had a fleeting glimpse of two rusty-colored raptors with forked tails as they flew over the wetland, but this was enough to tick them on our checklists, as crazy birders do, before turning for the long journey home. We anticipated their imminent extinction, but some years later healthy birds were brought over from Europe to found a thriving population now numbering about 2,000 pairs. The bird has been seen again in London and hunts the countryside of Hardy’s Wessex novels.

Yet behind these sweet stories eternal vigilance is needed as the price of biodiversity, to twist an expression often attributed to Thomas Jefferson. Habitats are not static, human pressures come and go and come again, and the globe continues to warm, encouraging competitive alien species, melting ice shelves under polar bears, et cetera. Besides, not everyone welcomes the natives home. Developers grumble that people should have a greater call on waterfront properties than eagles, ranchers in Wyoming and Idaho keep their guns handy watching for wolves, and an English student even complained that a red kite had swooped down for his sandwich! Restoring species to their habitats is patient work, and never ending.

That brings me back to Thomas Hardy who, as a Victorian, was lucky not to live in such anxious times. Life didn’t turn out well for Clym, the returning native. He never settled down happily and found himself at odds with residents and married a belle who became dissatisfied after he fell into poverty, working as a laborer cutting furze on the cruel Heath.

I always hope that after suffering trials sympathetic characters in the novels I read will be rewarded with a contented and harmonious life, but that never happens in the Hardy world where fate trumps hope. The author may have called himself a realist, but pessimism is an unattractive demeanor that curbs endeavor and can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I wish it had been Jane Austen who had come to mind on my eagle day because Jane-AustenDarcy returned to Longbourne to marry Elizabeth Bennet and they lived happily ever after, and that is the metaphor I wish for all returning natives.

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A Tree for Hugging

Posted on October 9, 2013 by Roger Gosden

If the Ancient Greeks ever had a deity for protecting the environment it was Artemis. She was a goddess of the forests and wilderness, a defender of the vulnerable who once hid in a chestnut tree from Zeus when he was in one of his violent fits of temper.Artemis

Divine knowledge did not save the iconic American chestnut tree, which provided a glorious quarter of the eastern forest canopy. A blight carried by timber imported from Asia was first noticed on trees at the Bronx Zoo in 1904, and quickly spread across their entire range from Maine to Georgia along and on both sides of the Appalachian chain. Within a few decades they were extinct except for sprouts from old stumps and roots, which became infected long before they became trees. The chestnut provided some of the most beautiful and useful wood in the country, as well as heavy annual harvests of delicious nuts.  I never knew this history, and none of the older people I met after arriving in the USA in the 1970s ever told me what I had missed. How quickly memories of the lately-departed can fade.

But I knew plenty about chestnuts in Britain, which are schoolboy favorites. On chilly winter evenings we warmed ourselves beside glowing braziers in London streets where we bought bags of roasted sweet chestnuts. Earlier in the fall, our school yards were battlegrounds for playing with chestnuts of another kind, the horse chestnut or conker tree. This tree sheds large numbers of nuts inside spiny burrs, burnished like the top of a prized wooden dresser with a round, pasty-white patch of skin, looking like a larger version of its American cousin. Too bitter to eat, conkers served us well in schoolboy wars. We could hardly wait for them to fall, and would throw sticks into trees to bring on the harvest.

In those days, wearing short pants and with pockets bulging with booty we trekked home to plan a campaign. We spread the nuts across a table to select the best for battle and reserve one for our pockets because grandma told us it was a sure cure for piles. The largest nuts were not the best for fighting, and we remembered that Goliath had cracked under David’s little “conker.” I preferred my chestnuts to be “cheesers”, whose flat sides could break my opponent’s nut after arcing through the air like a mortar bomb. We used a kitchen skewer to bore a hole through our conkers before threading a string or bootlace which was tied at one end with a knot. Then we were ready.

Conkers was first played on the Isle of Wight in early Victorian times, and because that is my birth-place and my cousin John McConkey is from there I feel I am a special authority on the subject! The game is played in pairs starting with the winner of a coin toss. With the string wound tightly around his forefinger and the other holding the conker he tries to strike the other nut which is held limply by his opponent. He aims to break it, preferably with a single beautiful, explosive “Crack.”

Smash the conker!

Smash the conker!

Starting as a none-er, the winning conker is promoted to a one-er, and the victorious boy looks around the yard for the next contestant. According to some rules, the score can be additive, so if he defeats a six-er his conker becomes a seven-er, whereas his opponent’s would be an eight-er if he wins a round with a one-er. Some pretty high scores can be run up, and a lot of shells and kernels cast across the yard. If he missed in a tangle of strings, the contestants call, “Strings!” and the first boy to shriek is rewarded with another shot. If a conker is dropped, it is fair game to crush it underfoot with a triumphant whoop, “Stamps!” After releasing so much youthful aggression, the boys troop back to their classroom where stories about the Trojan Wars seem placid compared with what happened outside.

Even schoolboys have codes of decency, if not many, and none when it comes to conkers. In the good old days, we had secret formulas for hardening our nuts. Mine was to bake them in vinegar when Mum wasn’t looking. Opponents always sniffed conkers before the game started to check for cheating, but the smell of vinegar was dissipated if they were aired for a while. I heard that the hardest nuts have been passed undigested through a pig for collecting at the other end, and I suppose the conker owner hopes the other boy has a really stuffy head cold. I swear the story is not a “porker” (slang for a big fib).

There is a part of boyhood that never grows up, and the chestnut is one of its totems. The great ornamental tree evokes memories of gazing into the fall canopy feeling the anticipation with hands deep in empty pockets. But the joy of conkering doesn’t have to stop after graduating to long pants; it continues in some shires and counties into manhood, where grown men stand in opposing pairs, often outside pubs and well-fortified. These are sturdy individuals who are fortunate to live in a country that tolerates (nay, celebrates) eccentricity, and doubly lucky if they don’t have to creep out the backdoor while their wives aren’t looking. It is no wonder that Britain and Ireland have produced far more champions than any other country—if only in this sport. Good luck to them in the next World Conker Championship, which will be held in the English Midlands next weekend (October 13) (I kid you not).

The game is hardly known in North America, except perhaps in New York where a winning conker is naturally called a “Killer.” It is mild compared to the national sport of head-bashing in football, which could have originated with conker players frustrated in a country where horse chestnut trees are rare (Ahem). The native American buckeye, sometimes called a horse chestnut here, is no more than a close relative, but its nuts are too small for respectable play, as are those of American chestnuts if you can find any.

The story of the native American chestnut is like a tragedy that preceded it by only a few decades—the annihilation of the native American Indian culture. These ghosts of the forests were formerly vibrant here in Virginia, but while one was felled by axes and fungal blight, the other disappeared in a hail of bullets and foreign viruses.

American chestnuts were not on my mind until recently when I was shown a typescript browning with age, titled Chestnut Notes. Pam Walker, granddaughter of the renowned New York surgeon Robert Morris (1857-1945), had found it in a bundle of papers from the time when he was preparing a book that become a standard work in arboriculture and horticulture (Nut Growing, Macmillan & Co., 1931). The script, dated October 1929, begins, “Something over twenty years ago when the chestnut blight became a serious matter in Connecticut I looked for resistant species and varieties for the purpose of making hybrids.”

Chestnut hybrid on former Morris estate

Chestnut hybrid on former Morris estate

I was curious whether this great amateur and forgotten pioneer was first to tackle the disastrous die-off of chestnut trees. He began experimenting very soon after the fungal epidemic was recognized, and could not have known in 1909 that it would spread across the nation. Accompanied by Pam last weekend, I visited the Morris estate in Connecticut which, before it passed through other owners to become a public park today, was 440 acres of forest between Stamford and Greenwich where he conserved trees and wildlife. I knew he had used American chestnut pollen to create hybrids with blight-resistant species of chestnut (Chinese chestnut and chinkapin or chinquapin) followed by backcrossing and testing every few years with the aim of producing almost pure American varieties that had inherited genes for resistance. It was a goal that could never be achieved in his lifetime. We found only a few specimen trees that may be derived from his work. Today, research continues under state management in Connecticut and Virginia where enormous progress has been made, giving prospects for people who are alive today to see American chestnuts flourish again.

Before all leaves have fallen, I will travel half-way across the state with a Virginia forester to see how far this work has progressed. And perhaps I will see a rare original specimen, not just a hybrid, that I am told stands a record 20 feet tall without blight. I will then feel well-prepared for an article I have been invited to write for a journal. To some this sudden absorption will probably sound nuts, but people who love our native trees will understand this beautiful obsession. As John Muir said, “Going to the woods is going home.”

These thoughts were running through my head one bright morning last month while I was walking in our yard. We have two or three acres of woodland, mainly loblolly pines, tulip poplars, hickories, and various oak species. They are old friends that stand like guardians around the home, and I pay them particular attention during the hurricane season. I know them all, or I thought I did.

No more than thirty paces from our house my attention was drawn to something I had never noticed before in the ten years we have lived here. Scattered on the ground there were 50 to 100 apple-green burrs. I stooped to pick one, but dropped it immediately because it felt as sharp as a sea-urchin and more spiny than any burr I had ever held. Chestnut plate#2Some had been split by squirrels to remove their fruit. When I prized others open with a pocket knife I found three beautiful nuts inside that looked as bright as if they had been French-polished. There is only one tree that could have produced them in the small grove of pines: it has a bole a foot wide and reaches seventy feet to catch sunlight, where there were more prickly fruit among the long leaves waiting to fall.

I couldn’t tell if it was American or Chinese, nor did it matter. It was like a gift, and I ran inside shouting, “Come look! You’ll never believe it!” Afterwards I searched the neighborhood and even further afield for others, but this is the only chestnut tree.  Thank you, Artemis.Chestnut treehugger#2

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